Thursday, September 08, 2005

Many of you will already have seen that another senior Israeli rabbi has joined the increasing chorus of Jewish clerics to blame Katrina on American support for disengagement: Rav Ovadiah Yosef. It's not surprising; it's fairly clear that Rav Ovadiah has trouble with (how can I put this politely...) his rhetoric getting out of control, and in recent years he has been expressing some rather strange ideas and been a little too prone to wishing people dead in all kinds of inventive ways. There's nothing to be said about this latest outburst that hasn't already been said about Lazer Brody's opinions.However, I would like to draw attention to another, more original aspect of his little speech, which hasn't received as much attention, and which I take particular exception to. Maran said:

“There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough Torah study… black people reside there (in New Orleans). Blacks will study the Torah? (God said) let’s bring a tsunami and drown them.”“Hundreds of thousands remained homeless. Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.”

As bad as it sounds in English, it sounds even worse in Hebrew, as the word he used for 'black people' ('kushim') is basically the Hebrew N-word (although, sadly, quite widely used).This racism -- from one the supposedly greatest rabbis of our generation -- is simply too disgusting for words. Draw your own conclusions.